Zipping and sipping

First road trip day, whee! It all started with a caltrain ride to South San Francisco where my chevy was waiting for me. It is the sensible Malibu but it's nice to drive, the seat adjustments are great and it has iPod connectivity so I won't be running out of German schlager or Finnish pro-communist songs anytime soon.

I started by heading north towards Sonoma where I did the Canopy tour where we zip lined for about hour and a half from giant redwood to another. The longest leg was 800 feet or around 250 meters and the views - as one might expect - were truly stunning. Too bad I couldn't take a camera with me because I couldn't fasten my phone to my harness. Well, I guess the memory will serve me for quite long so everything is fine. Everyone also got a diploma for doing it but it seemed that most of the diploma was just an ad for a local restaurant. Well, it included a free bruschetta (worth $8,95!) so how could I have resisted... Didn't have the arrogance to just eat the free bruschetta and go so I had an early dinner there as well. I guess that was their strategy all along and yet again it worked.

Only after the dinner I became a true sod sonomite when I headed to the wine country. I guess not many people know that the wine that really got me in to wines was Ravenswood Sonoma county old vines Zinfandel 2001 at a wine expo in 2004 perhaps. So what better destination for my winery fix than to revisit the beast that started it all? It was more appealing on a nostalgic level though. Guess my taste has evolved a bit since then but nevertheless it was a nice encounter.

For my accommodation I went to a Starbucks in Santa Rosa to google some reasonably priced guesthouses or hostels in the area. And apparently there are none. So enjoying the liberty of still having wheels under me (and not being totally wasted from the wine tasting) I booked a room in Vallejo. I also learned to love my gps more and more during the day.

The best sights were on highway one but the wine country didn't fall too far behind either. Now it feels nice to have a proper bed and clean sheets so early tomorrow morning I can start planning the next leg of the journey. Because road trips aren't really road trips if you know where you will spend the next night 24 hours in advance. ;)